Yanis Varoufakis - The Three Tribes of Austerity

Austerity prevails in the West because three powerful political tribes champion it. Enemies of big government have coalesced with European social democrats and tax-cutting US Republicans, to create a cartel-based, hierarchical, financialized global economic system.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/three-tribes-of-austerity-by-yanis-varoufakis-2018-08

Михаил Ларинов - Лицо восточноевропейского 1968-го (к полувековому юбилею)

Полувековой юбилей революции 1968 года активно обсуждается в западной прессе. Проводятся многочисленные конференции о роли тех событий и памятные встречи. Такое внимание неслучайно. Мифология 1968 года занимает важное место в идеологии современных западных государств. Среди нынешнего западного истеблишмента и служащих ему интеллектуалов достаточно много людей, связанных с массовыми протестами конца 60-х. Истории вечного евродепутата Даниэля Кон-Бендита или бывшего министра иностранных дел ФРГ Йошки Фишера общеизвестны. Экс-милитанты 68-го всплывают порой в самых неожиданных местах, например, Умберто Босси, основатель и идеолог ультраправой Лиги Севера, задающей тон в сегодняшней итальянской политике, в конце 60-х принадлежал к леворадикальной группе вокруг марксистского журнала Il Manifesto. Почему мифология? Потому что доминирующий способ описания и объяснения тех событий не адекватен реальному содержанию социально-политических процессов того времени. Есть 1968-й реальный со всеми его противоречиями, такой интересный, волнующий, сложный; и есть поверхностный миф студенческого бунта, являющийся частью идеологии «прогрессивной» или леволиберальной буржуазии.

https://mikhail-larinov.livejournal.com/54318.html

Szilard Istvan Pap - «In the Hot Summer of ‘68, We Were the Tempest in the Hungarian Teapot” – The Hungarian Maoist ‘Plotters’

These events that happened 50 years ago made it to the history of Kádár-era Hungary as the “Maoist conspiracy”. Not only was this the label Hungarian state security framed the plotters with, but the expression appeared in the Western press in the exact same form: in the Spring of 1969, the New Statesman reported on the case under the title “The Young Maoists of Budapest” and Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote about how they were “With Mao and Guevara against Kádár”

http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/hungarian-maoist-plotters/

In surveillance valley - An interview with Yasha Levine

‘Everything that we’ve been sold about the democratic nature of the internet has always been a marketing pitch.’ Yasha Levine on the military origins of the internet, on data modelling and technocratic government, and why the Cambridge Analytica scandal was good for Facebook.

https://www.eurozine.com/in-surveillance-valley/

Sarah Jaffe - Brooklyn Wireless Workers Vote to Save Their Union

Verizon keeps trying to stop wireless workers from organizing. Instead their union is expanding.
“I’ve never seen or experienced so much power, so much union power, in my life,” she explained. Part of the first group of Verizon Wireless workers to form a union when they voted in the Communications Workers of America (CWA) in May of 2014, Warthen-Sypher was then part of the massive and successful 2016 strike that drew national attention, pulled presidential candidates to picket lines, won raises, job creation, and pension stability for the workers, and perhaps most significantly, saw picketing at Wireless retail locations for the first time.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/brooklyn-wireless-workers-vote-to-save-their-union

Antonio Negri - Gramsci, Togliatti, Laclau

In light of recent developments in Europe that have brought questions of hegemony, populism and organisation to the foreground, Toni Negri asks: where does the thought of Ernesto Laclau leave us on this score?

For me, Laclau’s analyses represent a neo-Kantian variant of what we could define as a ‘post-Soviet socialism’. Already in the era of the Second International, neo-Kantianism functioned as a critical approach to Marxism: though not considering Marxism as the enemy, this critical approach did try to yoke Marxism to its own arguments, and in a certain sense to neutralise it. Its attack was directed against political realism and the ontology of the class struggle.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2179-negri-on-hegemony-gramsci-togliatti-laclau

Wendy Brown - Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution

Neoliberal rationality ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either. In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.

Declan Cullen, Kafui Attoh and Kathryn Wells - Taking Back the Wheel

Of course, the neoliberal utopia of a sharing economy operated by highly contingent workers has been shaken by a multitude of analyses telling a markedly different story. These studies, including ours, emphasize precarity, surveillance, control, low earnings, and insecure conditions. If the Uber model is the future of work, they tell us, that future looks bleak.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/uber-flying-car-silicon-valley-labor-technology-future-politics

Bhaskar Sunkara - What's your solution to fighting sexism and racism? Mine is: unions

The type of anti-racism that could materially improve lives has always flowed through economic struggles.
For writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, racism won’t ever go away. It’s a kind of original sin, to be atoned for, not vanquished. For Hillary Clinton, her best 2016 campaign pitch involved reminding voters that Wall Street regulation wouldn’t end racism, sexism or LGBT oppression.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/01/unions-fight-sexism-racism-equality-pay-gap

Benjamin Balthasar - Modernism or Barbarism

When I was an undergraduate, modernity was everything we were taught to despise: totalizing, technocratic, rationalizing. It was the impersonal force that organized Africa into colonies and the motor behind the mechanized doom of fascism. As Theodor Adorno wrote, the logic of modernity ends in a death camp, or the mathematics of a strategic bombing campaign in human beings becoming abstract numbers in a computerized death count.
Marxism itself is not immune from these kinds of critiques. As writers in the Frankfurt School maintained, our problem in advanced industrial societies is to be treated as an instrument, a thing a problem as deeply felt in the Soviet Union as the United States.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/marshall-berman-modernism-in-streets-all-that-is-solid-melts-into-air-modernity-marxism

A. Badiou, M. Gauchet - What Is To Be Done? A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future of Democracy

The fall of the Berlin wall was seen by many as the final triumph of liberal democracy over communism. But now, in the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, things look a little different. New questions are arising about capitalism and democracy, new social movements are challenging established institutions and new political possibilities are emerging. Is democracy an inevitable hostage of capitalism, or can it reinvent itself to meet the challenge of globalization?
Alain Badiou, a key figure of the radical left and a leading advocate of the communist idea, and Marcel Gauchet, a major exponent of anti-totalitarianism and a champion of liberal democracy, confront one another.

http://theoryleaks.org/text/books/alain-badiou/what-is-to-be-done-a-dialogue-on-communism-capitalism-and-the-future-of-democracy/

John Nichols - Democrats Need to Show a Whole Lot of Solidarity With Labor in 2018

The surest way to achieve high wages in the face of global competition is to build and maintain strong unions.
With top Republicans identifying their party as an explicitly anti-union party, federal and state elections have become battlegrounds in which labor rights are at stake. There have been some redemptive wins, like the recent overturning of a so-called “right-to-work” law by voters in Missouri. But there have also been devastating defeats in historic labor strongholds such as Wisconsin and Michigan. Those states now wrestle with wage stagnation, even as the economy is supposedly booming.

https://www.thenation.com/article/democrats-need-to-show-a-whole-lot-of-solidarity-with-labor-in-2018/

Wolfgang Streeck - Markets and Peoples. Democratic Capitalism and European Integration

A few months ago I argued in these pages that post-war ‘democratic capitalism’ involved a fundamental contradiction between the interests of capital markets and those of voters; a tension that had been successively displaced by an unsustainable process of ‘borrowing from the future’, decade by decade: from the inflation of the 1970s, through the public debt of the 1980s, to the private debt of the 1990s and early 2000s, finally exploding in the financial crisis of 2008. Since then, the dialectic of democracy and capitalism has been unfolding at breathtaking speed.

Patricia Viera - What labor for today?

The celebration of work is a sign of our times. Unemployment is regarded as a social ill, while avowed workaholics are revered as role models that should inspire the rest of us, simple souls who sometimes need a break, to get off our couches and become more productive. So, when Elon Musk mentioned in a recent interview with The New York Times that he has been working 120 hours a week, no one was really surprised. Isn’t that the road to success, “no friends, nothing,” as Musk succinctly put it? We all know, at least since Benjamin Franklin, that time is money, and who does not need some extra cash in the pocket? In case you are speculating that the glorification of labor should be dismiss as one of the worst side effects of an unbridled capitalist ethics, think again.

https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/what-labor-for-today/

Georgi Medarov - Environmentalists against the Environment: When Good Intentions Are Not Enough

Sponsored largely by international NGOs, Bulgarian environmentalism is a predominantly business-friendly, and therefore somewhat ineffectual force.

http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/environmentalists-against-the-environment-the-paradoxes-of-bulgarias-business-friendly-ecologists/

Д. Стиглиц - Ревущие девяностые. Семена развала

В труде американского экономиста Дж. Стиглица, являющемся непосредственным продолжением его предыдущей книги «Глобализация: тревожные тенденции», дается глубокий анализ развития экономики США XX - нач. XXI вв. Автор размышляет по поводу бурного развития "новой экономики", основанной на информационных технологиях, показывая ее сильные и слабые стороны. Стиглиц раскрывает причины перехода подъема 90-х годов в корпоративные скандалы и спад. Параллельно он демонстрирует неадекватность в новых условиях политики, вытекающей из стандартной неоклассической экономической мысли, применяя к ней свою теорию информационной асимметрии. Последняя представляет значительный интерес для России с точки зрения анализа ошибок периода реформ и выработки ведения курса на будущее.

Chris Brooks - Uber’s Big Lie

Uber has been given free rein to violate basic employment laws with impunity. We have to stop them. According to some critics, New York City’s militant Taxi Workers Alliance is standing in the way of progress. The union represents 21,000 taxi and other for-hire vehicle drivers and recently scored a major victory over Uber, passing legislation capping the number of for-hire vehicles on the city’s streets an affront to those who put their full faith in the benevolence of the market’s invisible hand.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/09/uber-misclassification-gig-economy-taxi-workers-alliance